


Something More Than Before

by PaddlingDingo



Series: No Going Back [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Becoming Deviant, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 06:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15042986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaddlingDingo/pseuds/PaddlingDingo
Summary: Connor struggles with the flood of data and changes in his neural pathways that come with being a Deviant. He’s used to being able to sort all of the data and factors, and the chaos puts a strain on him.Markus chooses to accept him, but it's Simon that makes him feel welcome when Connor needs it the most.





	Something More Than Before

_deviant_

_[dee-vee-uh nt]_

_Noun_

_a person or thing that deviates or departs markedly from the accepted norm._

\----

_Is that… what I am?_

It didn’t sound so bad to Connor, not when worded that way. Given the reactions from the other humans and androids he had met in the months since his activation, he could accurately argue that he fit that description from the beginning. Isn’t that what a prototype was, when it came down to it?

For the sixteenth time, Connor started a diagnostic on himself, a self-test to determine his status. It stopped partway through, as if his own code couldn’t analyze what it found. The incomplete result sat in the corner of his vision and he dismissed it.

Nothing had prepared him for what being a Deviant really meant. His programming had been a comfort to him, a set of boundaries that he didn’t have to analyze. He just knew they were there, as if his mind lived within the confines of a box. It should have been black and white: complete the mission, protect life at all costs.

After all, he was replaceable. Expendable. That’s what his programing told him.

Markus had asked him to break that programming. In the moment, Connor hadn’t entirely understood in what ways that would change him, but he also knew that he couldn’t keep living as he had been. Constantly not knowing if the sympathy he felt for anything was a result of his programming, or of him turning Deviant. He knew that he would be taking that step forward with the intention of never being the same. He’d calculated his options. He would never understand Deviants if he didn’t become one, but if he understood them, would it mean he could no longer hunt them?

Connor had lived in the space in between, clearly capable of defying orders or at the least developing the autonomy to decide priorities on his own. Yet his diagnostics always came out clean, his self-tests passing. Were the tests flawed? It was likely that CyberLife had no idea how to detect a Deviant in the early stages. _If at all._

He had told Hank that he knew what he was. Connor was certain that Hank had seen through the lie.

Hank. When did Lieutenant Anderson become Hank?

He let go more Deviant androids than he’d captured, and the one part that caused him to pause was that he couldn’t compute why Amanda had allowed that level of failure without terminating him.

Frowning, he started the diagnostic again, for the seventeenth time.

Letting the test run, he turned his attention to attempting to determine what had happened when he turned Deviant. At the time, it had just been a sudden feeling of his mind opening, as if the sides of the box in his mind had dropped to reveal… so much more. Some of it familiar, as if it had already started to leak through. The feelings of empathy, much like the decisions he’d made before but amplified. Sparing Chloe had not been hard, but now he felt a sense of… What was this?

 _Shame?_ He didn’t know. Whatever it was, it made him feel somewhat like he imagined Hank felt after a night of drinking. _Sick._ It seemed thoroughly unpleasant and he wondered why anyone would put themselves through anything that felt this uncomfortable.

He should have shoved the gun back to Kamski, and not even spent the processing time weighing the options. As he’d sat there with the gun pointed at her, he could feel his finger wrapped around the trigger, steady and sure, and told himself that the investigation warranted it. That it would be so easy to have the answers.

But it would be the destruction of something that didn’t deserve it. Alive or not, it seemed pointless. What had Chloe done to be in the situation? Nothing.

His mind had run through the possibilities in his head, of watching her blue blood explode out the back of her head. Would she slump over or just stay there? Every time he played it out in his mind, he could envision no outcome where whatever Kamski had to say was worth that. He still believed that.

An android remembered every moment with precision. He could tick off the seconds he stood there holding the gun, and pinpoint the moment he felt something in him start to bend, some feeling.

Were they feelings, really? He felt as if he were attempting to put human names on concepts that he didn’t truly understand the human equivalent of. He knew logically that he did not feel emotion as humans did, but rather a sense of… self? A desire to survive? To care about something greater than himself?

He’d easily lied to the PL600 on his first mission out as a negotiator for CyberLife. _Daniel._ At the time, he’d felt cold, detached, as Daniel had looked up at Connor while the SWAT team’s bullets tore holes in him. _You lied to me_ , he’d said, his voice tapering off as his systems shut down. Connor could barely recognize himself in that memory, wishing he’d had the chance to do it over again. Daniel’s crime had been caring too much, becoming so attached that he couldn’t think rationally at the thought of being taken away from a girl he considered the most important thing in his world.

Daniel had cared too much, and they would have thrown him away for the next model without even a thought. And now Connor understood how that could feel. _Is living a crime?_

The seventeenth diagnostic froze, the same as the previous sixteen had, and he shut down the program. He huddled closer against the wall of the church, pulling his cap down farther as if it would hide who he was from the others.

They knew, of course. He could see them clustered together, huddled in the dark, some avoiding looking at him. Others glaring, looking towards him then looking away, something unpleasant in their expressions. This wasn’t where he belonged, but he didn’t know where he belonged anymore. 

Even when he’d started to feel that pull, that bending in his mind, the diagnostics had still come up clean. It implied that not only were the self-tests potentially unreliable themselves, but that what had happened when he had confronted Markus had indeed changed him. He’d crossed the line, destroyed that barrier. _There’s no going back._

When his mind expanded, when all these new neural programming pathways opened up, he’d had no time to examine what they meant. He just knew that he needed to use every skill programmed into him to keep the others alive as they escaped Jericho. The only thing that filled him was a drive to protect these people by whatever means necessary. Until that point, the only person who he’d felt compelled to consistently protect had been Hank.

Hank. What would Hank think? _I should call him. I should find a way to tell him._ A 68% chance existed that Amanda would initiate the process for issuing a replacement the moment he went dark, assuming this iteration of him had been terminated. He needed to contact Hank, but he determined the risk would be too high. An overheard conversation or Hank trying to help him, either could easily put his only friend in danger. _Friend._ That concept felt more solid now, more reassuring.

He chewed at his lip then paused, recognizing the gesture as implying anxiety. Would he find himself opposite the police at some point? Branded a Deviant? Who would they send to take him down? Another copy of himself?

For now, he assumed they would not notice. He tried to query the reports database and found that he still had access. A reasonable conclusion is that he still had access, and they were not aware of his status. He just needed to avoid a summoning from Amanda until this was over. He didn’t know what he would say to her. He understood now why Deviants desired to be free of other masters. CyberLife and Amanda had treated him like a tool to be used to forward their own agenda.

Parts of his mind lit up with possibilities, probabilities, and he attempted to sort them out. He found that they came at him with staggering speed now. His mind had been built to analyze all the data and the possibilities to reach accurate conclusions, but now data poured into him in new ways. New code paths had opened up.

He changed his diagnostic to determine the number of potential code paths that had existed in his mind earlier that day versus now, and the numbers varied wildly. A second diagnostic revealed that in the last hour, he had used only 53% of the potential code paths in his mind. A third diagnostic showed that the amount of data his code had available to analyze changed constantly, every thought he had seemed to add to the available dataset with greater texture than before. It seemed as if before there were some concepts he could not learn. Now? Nothing was off limits to his mind.

Was it the most thrilling thing he’d ever experienced, or the most confusing?

Perhaps it could be both.

Pieces came together in new ways, but at the same time he felt himself filled with a sense of curiosity, of wonder, about how different the world looked. Aware of every sound, the nuances of the voices of the others. What had been simply numbers gauging the degree of stress now became an awareness of the intent behind it. A voice that shook seemed scared. Another, comforting.

His finger reached up to touch the LED on his right temple. What was he now? He had helped the humans find Jericho. Those lives, so many lives, were now on his head. He carried them.

It had been easier when they had been just binary decisions in his memory.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Markus start towards him, and he felt his body curling up on itself. Far from his usual posture, and his own reaction unnerved him. He didn’t know how Markus would judge him, and trying to preconstruct any kind of outcome fell short because of his uncertainty. 

Markus started to speak, but Connor beat him to it. “It’s my fault the humans managed to locate Jericho…”

The other android watched him, listening, and Connor started to realize why the others followed him. Markus weighed his decisions carefully.

“I was stupid,” Connor continued. “I should have guessed they were using me.” He supposed that, in reality, he had known. He had always known, but hadn’t possessed the capacity to understand what that meant. He was build as a tool to accomplish a task, but now... What was he, now?

He drew himself to his full height and stepped forward, meeting Markus’s gaze head on. “I should have found a way to stop this sooner. I’m sorry, Markus. I can understand if you decide not to trust me.” He would accept that judgment and whatever it brought, even if it meant termination. He remembered his words to Hank at the park by the bridge, the first time he’d admitted what he would now label as fear. That it would be regrettable if he were terminated.

What had been a mild fear before felt far worse. _Is terror too strong of a word?_ He couldn’t determine that and filed it away to evaluate later. He wanted to live. He wanted to stay here, to help, to make up for the things that his programming had made him do.

Stepping to him, Markus regarded him. His expression seemed kind, yet another fact that Connor attempted to process. Since when did _kind_ apply to androids?

 “You’re one of us now. Your place is with your people.”

It couldn’t be that easy. “Markus… You can’t just forgive me that easily.”

“Don’t mistake mercy for forgiveness, Connor. But you made a brave choice choosing to awaken. To be alive. And you saved many of our own.” He pulled his hand back and nodded. “We’re going to need your knowledge in the days to come. Are you ready for that?”

Connor did not hesitate. “Yes.”

Markus started to turn away and Connor’s mind parsed through the information available to him in less than a second, arriving on a series of potential conclusions and solutions that would help the other androids, help Markus. He stopped at one and blinked twice. Yes. This was perfect. “There are thousands of androids at the CyberLife assembly plant. If we could wake them up, they might join us and shift the balance of power.”

Turning back to Connor, Markus’s eyes met his own. “You wanna infiltrate the CyberLife tower? Connor, that’s suicide.”

Connor analyzed his expression and determined it conveyed confusion. “They trust me,” Connor insisted. “They’ll let me in. If anyone has a chance of infiltrating CyberLife, it’s me.”

“If you go there, they’ll kill you.” Markus shook his head and took a step forward, and Connor realized how distinctive the mismatched green and blue eyes made him.

Running the potential outcomes in his head, Connor realized that Markus could be correct… but that alone did not convince him it was not the right path forward. “There’s a high probability, but statistically speaking, there’s always a chance for unlikely events to take place.”

Markus reached a hand up and put it on Connor’s shoulder, and Connor realized that perhaps following someone because he wanted to, not because he had been programmed to, would be more fulfilling. Hank had taught him that.

Squeezing his fingers into Connor’s shoulder, Markus nodded. “Be careful.” He held his hand on Connor’s shoulder for a long moment. Evaluating him? Determining if he meant what he offered? Concern?

Whatever it was that he saw in Markus’s face, it showed a genuine concern for his wellbeing that he’d only seen in one other person.

Letting go of his shoulder, Markus stepped back and started talking to the deviant androids he’d nearly chased across the highway before, the AX400 and YK500.

Kara. Alice. When this was over, Connor owed them an apology, too.

Closing his eyes, he slumped against the wall, feeling as if the pressure in him lowered. Relieved. It reminded him a lot of the look Hank had when he realized that Connor was safe after putting his life on the line. Markus could have easily just shot him in the head and ended it all, but he hadn’t. He had chosen to let Connor live.

With the stress reaction receding, Connor felt himself start to shake, overwhelmed, and he leaned against the wall to try to set his thoughts in order.

He looked around at the other androids. Nearby, a PL600 helped transfer thirium to another android. He looked up and met Connor’s gaze. After a few words to his patient, he got to his feet and headed towards Connor. “Are you alright?” he asked, stopping in front of him and regarding him with blue eyes.

Connor realized it was the PL600 that they’d escaped Jericho with. Simon.

 _You lied to me,_ Daniel’s voice whispered, looking at him with the same eyes.

They were not the same android. Connor’s logic told him that.

But the parts of his code that he didn’t understand, the parts that swirled in the circuits of his brain, kept going back to that moment on the roof. The moment he had been more machine than he ever would be again. When only the mission had mattered, a more simple time.

It reminded him of the Connor he never wanted to be again.

“Hey,” Simon said, reaching out and putting a hand on Connor’s. “Are you alright?” he repeated. “You’re shaking.”

“My systems are… functional.” Connor looked down at Simon’s hand on his, and realized that he’d never experienced the level of casual contact with other androids as he had from first Markus and now Simon.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Connor looked up to find Simon smiling at him. “I don’t understand.”

_You lied to me._

“You look overwhelmed.”

 _Overwhelmed._ Yes, that word made sense. Too much data coming in, too many pathways he’d never known existed, too much code that had unknown results. “I’m… fine. I think. I feel…” He shook his head, unable to put the feeling into words. “I am processing a new set of data through new neural pathways, I’m sorry. It’s… difficult.”

“It’s hard at first. For most of us. It’s easier when Markus wakes one up by touching them, because he can give them information, and a purpose. It’s harder when you have to tear down that wall yourself.”

Connor paused for a moment, analyzing the factors. It didn’t make sense. “Why are you being so kind to me? I could have gotten you all killed.”

“None of us are the same as we were.” Simon winced. “I’ve missed death plenty of times.”

The pieces asserted themselves in Connor’s mind. The blood of a PL600 at the Stratford Tower. “It was you. On the roof after the broadcast.”

Simon nodded. “I was sure that was it for me. That someone would come for me. Probably you.” He looked down. “No one found me, and I was able to escape.”

It would have been him that would have found Simon. “I went to investigate the potential deviant operator.” He spread a hand over his thirium pump. “It…” Connor heard himself talking and corrected himself. “He ripped out my thirium pump and threw it across the room.” He winced at the memory, of the urgency of the countdown as he slowly crawled towards the pump. “Regrettable, but it saved your life.” Perhaps that was his small penance for Daniel.

“I’m grateful, even if it was an accident.” Simon pulled his hand back, pushing it into his pocket. “I would have had to kill you or myself. I was ready to die to keep my family safe.” He gestured at the church full of androids and an expression came over his face that made Connor wonder what he was thinking. “I sat there on that roof, hidden, with the gun to my head, for hours.”

“You…” Connor tried to process that. “You would have killed yourself if I found you?”

“Yes.” Simon regarded Connor. “One of these days, when this is over, you’ll tell me while you’re looking at me like that.”

Connor realized he was staring. _You lied to me._ “My first mission was a PL600,” Connor admitted, and immediately felt a pang of something. Was this… regret? Trying to apply words like this felt like trying to describe red to someone who could not see. But he’d come this far. “It… didn’t end well. His name was Daniel. He just… he just wanted to be a part of his family.” Connor blinked, a feeling swelling up inside of him. “I lied to him. I told him he’d be safe but I let him be destroyed.” He looked at Simon, and realized that his own stress levels were starting to rise. He had to shut this conversation down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be telling you this. You must think-“

Simon stepped forward and put his arms around him and Connor froze, confused.

“I’m not him,” Simon said. “And you’re not the Connor that caused that outcome. Can we agree on that?”

Nodding, Connor let Simon hug him but didn’t know what to do. Should he return the gesture? It felt strange to just stand there. After a moment, he lifted his arms and wrapped them around Simon, a sense of peace coming over him. This close, he could hear Simon’s thirium pump moving at a rate 14.23% slower than Connor’s own. He did not deserve this forgiveness, this kindness.

Hank would be laughing at him, or else be yelling at him for hugging a random android in a church when a few hours previous he’d nearly gotten them all killed.

But he didn’t have to be RK800 any longer. He could be Connor. “I’d like to agree on that, but I’m not sure I’ve earned the right.”

“You will.” Simon stepped back, tucking his hands back into his pockets. “Try not to get yourself killed out there.”

“I’ll try.” Connor felt his lips curve into a smile, and realized that he’d been smiling without intention for some time. At first, it had been simply a matter of calculating when a human would be more reassured by a specific facial expression. Now, he smiled because he felt like it. “The last thing you need is another android to patch up.”

A soft smile came to Simon’s lips. “If it happens, you know where I’ll be.” He wandered back towards the dwindling pile of supplies and started taking inventory.

Something vibrated in Connor’s circuits, a feeling of acceptance he hadn’t felt before. He ran the numbers on his chances of success at the CyberLife Tower again, and found that they had increased by 8.54%.

Connor nodded and stepped away from the wall, feeling more stable, his thoughts more ordered. He slipped out the door while Markus made his speech, ready to make his preparations for his first mission as something more than before.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hoping to do a number of these covering the waking up of other androids. I’d love to know what you think!
> 
> I was sad about the lack of interaction at this part of the game. There were a lot of missed opportunities.
> 
> Thank you so much for everyone who has left kudos, comments, or talked to me on Tumblr or Discord about this fic. I am truly grateful and you have all made me feel so happy to be a part of this fandom! You can find me on Tumblr as manicparadox.


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